Techwire: California Initiative Could Change Data Collection

January 25, 2018

An address on a cable contract, the location of a cellphone, a store purchase or a simple Internet search for a vacation spot. All of that information about a consumer can be unknowingly collected and sold by businesses — at least for now.

A proposed ballot initiative aims to give Californians the power to find out what personal information a business has gathered about them and tell them to stop — an approach critics say could stifle commerce but privacy experts say doesn’t go far enough.

“The reality is most of us have a vast digital file being collected about us,” Alastair Mactaggart, a lead sponsor of the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, told Techwire in an interview this week.

“There’s a lot of risk for Californians,” he said.

At issue is how businesses — including Internet service providers, Google, Facebook and large brick-and-mortar corporations — use the information they collect about their customers. The information, which can be sold to third parties, is a valuable commodity and a tool for businesses that want to target products to someone’s preferences and needs.

It’s a broad and complicated issue of privacy rights that goes beyond just a person’s home address or Social Security number. It involves the collection of a vast amount of information used to create profiles, trends, demographics and other data sets.

If you’ve come to our site from a search engine like Google or a social platform like Facebook, your information is possibly being collected, tracked, and shared by them. Learn more and/or opt-out of some sharing on CAPrivacy.org.

This website is intended for the sole use of United States citizens and permanent residents.

Paid for by Californians for Consumer Privacy. Committee major funding by Alastair Mactaggart.